When then is hope to be found among people? Where the sufferings have been greatest . . . look to those who have been excluded and placed on the margins . . . The place for creative hope that arises out of suffering is most likely now to be found among blacks, women, and homosexuals. These outcasts may well be the custodians of those thin places . . . watchers at the frontiers between what is and what is to be.

Peter Gomes, The Haunt of Grace by Ted Loder